The present invention relates in general to an apparatus having a pouch for carrying a water sensitive device and an integral housing. More specifically, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for forming a hermetic seal around a wire of various diameters extending from the device while it is positioned in the pouch.
In this modern era, electronic devices play an increasingly important role in every day life. Often these devices are used for communication, medical or other uses and they are often susceptible to damage when exposed to water. For this reason, many different types of waterproof containers or pouches have been made in an effort to protect the devices from the damaging effects of water. However, such devices often have a wire that must extend from the pouch to the outside for a user to access. The wire may be used as an external electronic connection, headphones, microphone or the like. Unfortunately, with many of the prior art waterproof pouches, when the wire extends outside the pouch, the hermetic seal is broken thereby exposing the device to water damage. Many prior art hermetically sealed pouches ignore the problem and simply do not allow the use of an externally connecting wire with the device inside the pouch. This limitation is clearly undesirable and, as such, these pouches severely limit the use of most modern electronics equipment. It is simply unacceptable that the prior art pouches requires the user to choose between using the device or protecting the device from water damage.
To address the need of users who must have access to a wire that extends from the device to the outside of the pouch, other prior art devices have attempted to provide a waterproof pouch with an intermediate connection that connects with the device inside the pouch. This built in electrical connection enables the user to plug in, for example, a pair of headphones and continue using the device. A significant disadvantage of this is that there is no provision for other types of connective wire, or connection to other types of equipment other than headphones supplied with the pouch. Clearly, a pouch having a dedicated connection is inefficient and unnecessarily limiting. Further, the external connection is susceptible to the damaging effects of the elements so that when it is necessary to use the external connector, the probability of failure is unreasonably high.
Another problem with the prior art devices is that the hermetic seal cannot be reformed around the pouch once the device and the wire are removed from the pouch. Further, another problem arises because not all devices have similar terminating connectors or wire diameters. Thus, there is a great need for a versatile apparatus that may adapt to a particular device and that can form a hermetic seal around any type of wire without requiring the use of adaptor plugs. Further still, there is a great need for a versatile apparatus that is adaptable from device to device so that a hermetic seal may be applied around various diameter wires or no wire at all.
What is needed is an apparatus that may repeatedly form the hermetic seal around a pouch when an external wire, connected to the device inside the pouch, is present or even when the wire is not present.